My Bio, As I See It

I received (from one Scott Brooks) a request for my full "bio" (biographical information), so I wrote the following, for anyone who is interested (one caveat: this is not definitive, just what came to me just now):

We live in a time of general incompetence, in science and in society, which seems to have come upon us suddenly, yet which has had a long buildup. I'm afraid academic titles don't mean what they used to mean and, in my own case, nearly 40 years ago I walked away from academia before getting my PhD, with clear eyes and a light heart, untainted by any sense of regret or loss. Further academic education had lost its relevance to me-- after 3 and 1/2 years spent getting a Master's in Physics, and 2 more years of unfocused work to find a PhD topic of any interest at all to me--so I shed it, easily and casually. I did, however, retain the notion that I was a good physicist, and that I could correct or remake science, even on a rather grand scale, given the right circumstances. That, it has turned out, was not the vain pridefulness of untested youth, but a prescient notion, which took nearly 20 years to come to fulfillment.

Along the way, I have enjoyed, among many other things, scientific programming and high-tech electronics in the industrial sector. My specialty, one might say, was modelling physical systems, such as high-tech instruments--or simply, solving any problems associated with understanding the detailed physical workings of the things that were brought to my attention. (One might say these were my "Einstein at the patent office" years. Great accomplishments do not come out of nothing, and take time both to come to mind and to develop through focused, disciplined research.)

I was also unemployed for substantial periods of time, primarily because (looking back with philosophical hindsight) when I was employed I was generally underemployed, simply by being in a subordinate position doing what my employers wanted done. What I was really meant to do in life was to discover the new, not be a technician of the old. Our society and our educational system have gone down, just as I saw it coming 40 years ago, in demanding technicians instead of scientists, educating people to exercise the consensus (or the latest proprietary software), rather than to keep digging for the truth regardless of current beliefs and popular fads.

Let's make a long story short now. In 1992, I got a job as a Research Associate analyzing data on remote aerosols. My understanding split with what my employer/superior wanted to hear, and I ended up submitting my own papers to a peer-reviewed journal, for which I was "terminated due to cuts in funding" (the official line, false but unquestioned and unquestionable). It took me two years to get those papers published, but I did. And long before I even submitted them, I knew I was rewriting the "official" understanding of those remote aerosols. Basically, what I did was pursue my own research program into understanding how the constituents in those aerosols were measured. By the time I was ready to write the paper(s)--one paper became two--I realized I was my own Principal Investigator, for the first time, and I knew I was notably good at it. I now knew I could, and should, be such an investigator--a Discoverer, like the most famous discoverers of old, the founders of modern science.

So when I was "terminated", in 1994, I kept my head up and my mind open to new possibilities. And over the next 3 years a number of critical strands drew together, around the subject of the "ancient mysteries"--myths, superstitions, "sacred" texts, megalithic monuments, and the ever-sharp shards of ancient science and its attendant ancient philosophy, with the constellations on the celestial sphere not the least of it all.

In 1997, I discovered the Great Design of the "gods", and all that the world has done since is, it seems more and more the case to me, no more than the avoidance of that great truth. There is a new Foundation of the world to be studied, and I am the Discoverer of it, the Galileo (and Copernicus, and Newton) of this time--their spirit, that is. No, I'm not saying I'm great--I'm saying that is how great the Great Design is; but I would be a fool not to be proud of myself for discovering it, as no one else ever did. Discovering it was like walking into a valley of pure gold (quite literally so, when I came to realize the central meaning of "gold", or "golden", in the descriptions of so many things in ancient myths). Its attendant discoveries, of each separate mystery, were like an endless series of gold nuggets, lying out in the open waiting to be picked up since time immemorial, since the beginning in fact.

My small contributions to climate science (which I consider just those of a competent physical scientist) are nothing compared to that, but the world is hung up on the pathetic mess of scientific incompetence and political tyranny that make up the "climate debate". And false dogmas are generally ascendant over good honest reason in the world now. How can I bring forth the new foundation, the new paradigm, in such circumstances? False dogmas mean inevitable war, and today we see groups (like Muslim jihadists, and angry young black men in America) that seem hell-bent on going to war, any war they can lay their hands on. I would call on those groups to lay down their arms, their false dogmas, and listen to me. Listen to new, greater truth and understanding of the world that seems so eternally, hopelessly divided. The people of the world need to learn the true origin of it all, and unlearn the false dogmas that have kept the wars going, throughout history. And that means they--you--will have to take up where I leave off, and study it. Study the world, and what has been handed down since the beginning, and separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the true from the false. Above all, set "treat others as you want to be treated by others" above "an eye for an eye". The latter belief is being chained to a hateful, blind past; the former, seeing the truth and a hopeful tomorrow.